Morality in Gaming

Ever since KotOR and Fable hit the scene, it seems like morality systems have been all the rage, especially in RPGs. Unfortunately, very few games ever really do it well, and the end result is a distinct feeling that the developers saw it as a cheap way to add replay value. The reason is twofold. First, most moral choices are annoyingly black and white; either you send an orphaned kitten to college, or you punt him across the room for no good reason. Protip: If all your dialogue options look exactly the same, with one obviously good, one neutral, and one obviously evil choice, then you need to come up with some more creative dialogue choices (I'm looking at you, Mass Effect). Nuance is what makes moral choices interesting, and in an RPG, it is essential if you want to allow your players the freedom to play a character that is interesting to them. The various D&D based games are usually better about this, since they have the law/chaos distinction alongside good/evil, but most other games pretty fall flat. Even on my recent playthrough of KotOR, I found the good/evil distinction blatantly apparent in 95% of the situations I faced, and rarely did it present the option that I would have liked to choose.

The other problem is the lack of impact that your decisions may have. Most games will have almost exactly the same story, regardless of what choices you make. Fable II at least made an attempt at changing this, but most games don't even bother. When playing on the darker side, I often find myself wondering why I'm fighting this evil guy all the time, when it would be much easier to ally with him, and then betray him at a convinient moment. Not only would it be a lot easier than having to cut my way through his entire fucking army single-handedly, but it would also let me use him to take out those who would be my biggest opposition once I sieze power for myself. But instead, I get stuck with the good-guy's storyline, and as a consolation I can be a huge prick all throughout it. To be fair, some games do add some epic "betray the good guys" scenes (KotOR and NWN2 are extremely well done in that regard), but they're always at or near the end, too late to have a meaningful impact on the story.

A side effect of this is a tendancy towards extremely watered-down options. Since allowing a player to be too good or too evil would totally throw the storyline off, such actions aren't allowed, and the result is that being good mostly amounts to giving money to beggars, and being evil mostly involves holding them up for whatever they have left. The good guy always talks his way through a problem, while the bad guy uses force etc., etc. Additionally, the biggest sacrifices that a good player has to make usually amount to something completely trivial, like a sum of money or a cool item, while the biggest punishment for being evil is most often having to act like a brat half the time so that you don't accidently swing your alignment towards good, and/or enduring lectures from your more light-minded comrades.

And on that note, it seems like Fallout 3 is the first game since Baulder's Gate II to limit your companions based on your alignment. It never ceases to amaze me what atrocities a good-aligned NPC will help me commit, and all without offering more than a dissparoving snippet of dialogue in protest.

To be frank, I wish most games would stop mucking about with big-picture morality, and just focus on doing one branch of the story well. Mass Effect did a good job of this, by offering a character that was obviously good, but giving the player the option to choose what kind of a good guy he would be.